As a child she had heard tell of the acclaimed Southlands bridges but had never been able to envision them for herself. She could well believe the legend that they had not been built by the hand of man, for what man could design such marvels? They crisscrossed, gleaming high above the dark forests below, connecting the cities and towns of Southlands, providing communion among the people that would otherwise have been impossible, unless men dared brave the forests below the plateaus.
On the plateaus, Una beheld cities of glorious towers and minarets such as she had never seen before, and the colors that presented themselves to her eyes were beyond her experience. They were familiar in some senses – green, red, or blue. But the shades were different, the hues bolder, more intense than anything she had before seen. And the frequent patches of blackened land, charred and smoking still, only made the colors seem brighter beneath the blue of the Southlands sky.
She thought of her homeland, last seen shrouded in dragon smoke, devoid of color. And her fire burned bitterly in her breast.
On and on she flew across the strange countryside, hardly knowing where to search. But at last, as she passed over the largest and most beautiful of the bridges, something caught her eye.
The desecrated castle.
She recognized it from her dream: the enormous, fire-ravaged structure surrounded by ruined gardens of skeletal tree stumps and ash-blown shrubberies. It was restored some now, not so decayed as it had appeared in her dreams. Several of the towers were being rebuilt, and much of the ash had been cleaned from its stones, revealing the colors beneath. But she recognized it as the hateful palace of her nightmares.
And she knew that here was Lionheart’s home.
Before the great castle was a city, the greatest of all the cities she had yet seen. It bore deep black scars from many fires among the streets and tall buildings. Nevertheless, as she flew high above it, she could feel the excitement of teeming life below her.
She could not land anywhere near for fear of being seen, so she chose instead to take shelter in the deep ravine beside the plateau, beneath the black covering of forest. The trees grew so thickly there that they blocked out the sun, for which she was grateful. The ground trembled as she landed, but other than the sounds she made as she crawled through the brambles of the forest floor, all was silent. There was a sense of deadness in the air of the forest. And beneath the deadness, a smell of life that was not life. She smelled it through her own smoke, and it made her shudder.
Una crawled to the edge of the forest, where the land began to slope up steeply and the trees ended in an abrupt line, and gazed up to the white arc of a bridge high above her. She realized suddenly that she had flown for many days without rest. Her wings and limbs quivered, aching for respite.
“I cannot rest,” she told herself. “I cannot rest until I find . . . I must find him. But how can I do so in this state?”
She looked down at her claws, huge and black and gnarled. “He won’t even recognize me. Leonard . . . how could you love a monster?”
A growl rumbled deep in her throat, and flames slid between her teeth. With a vicious snarl, she opened her mouth and let out a billow of fire on her own limbs, then turned her head and blew more fiercely on her body and wings, wishing she could burn herself away and be no more.
When the smoke cleared, Una looked again, and one hand was that of a princess. The other was scale-covered and cruel.
26
The dragon fire that sustained her had sunk low in her breast. But Una felt it there still, where her heart should be. “No,” she whispered, clutching the front of her gown. “Let it die. Just let it die.”
She knew it would not.
She practiced walking among the tall forest trees, struggling to carry herself upright and lift her feet. Her movements needed to be less awkward if she was going to pass unnoticed in the city. The sun rose high above her, but the air was icy. She welcomed the fierceness of winter air against her skin, however, desperate to cool the burning that pulsed through her. Her left hand seemed to suck the light into its dark scales and render it blackness. She covered it with her human hand, tried to tuck it under the folds of her tattered garments. The left sleeve of her dress was still mostly intact, and she pulled it low over her knuckles.
“I must find him,” she told herself, looking out from the shelter of the forest up toward the city. “Or at least have word of him.”
The thought filled her with fear. The Dragon’s words came to mind:
“Betrothed to another.”
She stepped out of the trees. “It’s not true,” she said. The place on her finger where her mother’s ring had once sat felt strangely bare. Una clenched her hands, human and dragon, into fists. “I trust him.”
Fire burned her throat, but she swallowed it back.